Boring tools age well
Plain text, standard formats and a handful of dependable utilities outlast every framework of the year. We keep our stack short on purpose, and our notes even shorter.
Featured
Small servers, honest limits
Most projects never need a cluster. A modest machine, sensible defaults and a little patience carry surprisingly far, and fail in ways you can actually understand. We look back at three years of running everything on hardware you could lift with one hand.
Latest entries
On writing fewer features
Every option you add is a promise to maintain it. This summer we removed more than we shipped, and the product felt noticeably faster for it.
Backups you actually restore
A backup is only a theory until you have restored from it. We now rehearse a full restore once a quarter, with the clock running and nobody improvising.
Working late, shipping early
Quiet hours are great for deep work, but not for releases. A short field guide to deciding which tasks belong to the night and which ones really do not.
Five colours are enough
A restrained palette keeps interfaces readable and teams honest. We walk through how a small set of tones carried an entire product for three years.
Small servers, honest limits
Most projects never need a cluster. A modest machine, sensible defaults and a little patience carry surprisingly far, and fail in ways you can actually understand.
Grids, margins and breathing room
White space is not empty space. Notes from a spring spent tidying layouts, and why the most useful change was almost always to remove something.
Mornings with a slow dashboard
We replaced a wall of charts with three numbers and a sentence. Here is what we kept, what we dropped and what we learned from the silence.
Documentation as a garden
Docs are never finished. They need pruning, weeding and the occasional new bed. A gentle routine that keeps ours alive without a dedicated gardener.
Rainy-day runbooks
Incidents rarely happen at convenient times. A good runbook is short, has one owner and starts with the question you will actually ask at 3 a.m.
About
Liteland is a tiny independent studio. We build small tools, write about the craft and try to leave every project a little simpler than we found it.
This journal is where we keep our notes: what worked, what we removed and what we would do differently. It is written slowly, edited twice and published without a schedule.
Topics
PracticeCraftDesignOperationsNotes
Reading list
- The Mythical Man-Month, Frederick P. Brooks
- A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander
- The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman
- Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott
- The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander